


Nonmaterial Facts

by DesertScribe



Category: Hello (From Under the Tree) - Adele Parody (YouTube)
Genre: Christmas Lights, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 12:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19229461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Connecticut law requires sellers to disclose any knowledge they have of problems with the heating, plumbing, or electrical systems of a property.  It does not require them to disclose rumored or known hauntings.  Too bad for Nicole, who really wasn't expecting her new house to include an unwanted roommate of the only occasionally corporeal variety.





	Nonmaterial Facts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [debirlfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debirlfan/gifts).



Some people get visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and taken on life-changing vision quests, at least if Charles Dickens was to be believed. Nicole, on the other hand, seemed to be stuck with the ghost of Christmas Fail, and he didn't even have any kind of a personal lesson that he wanted to teach her. He just came with the house, not that Nicole knew anything about that until it was too late. Damn Connecticut and its so-called "ghostbuster law."

Nicole should have known something was off as soon as she saw just how low the asking price for the property was. However, she was desperate to get out of her old place, and the building inspector she hired swore up and down that there wasn't any evidence of anything being wrong with the building's structural integrity, wiring, plumbing, HV/AC, or roof. Even the basement was amazingly dry and free of mildew (unlike her old place), and the seller claimed they had tested for radon twice and found nothing both times. The worst that could be said about the place was that squirrels could get onto the roof and make weird noises while they ran around up there, and even that was not much of an issue since they couldn't get into the attic to cause any damage. The house was by far the biggest and best place she was going to find in her price range without needing to double her commute or more, so she put in an offer for full asking price and allowed herself to believe that she was the one rushing the sellers to closing instead of the other way around. In an amazingly short amount of time, all the paperwork was signed and filed with her name on the deed and on the new mortgage, and the house was _hers_.

The move-in went smoothly. There wasn't so much as a lost box or cracked glass to mar the experience. Nicole spent the next few weekends unpacking boxes, hanging pictures, arranging knickknacks, and generally settling in. The house looked even better with her own belongings in it, and sometimes Nicole had a hard time believing how lucky she had been to get it. Sometimes the noise of the squirrels on the roof could be a little annoying while she was trying to fall asleep, but it was better than the heavy traffic noise she had to put up with at her old place, so she wasn't going to complain. And if sometimes the weird noises sounded like they were coming from inside the house instead of up on the roof then that just had to be her imagination, right? It wasn't as if anybody could really be letting themselves in to wander around and run into boxes and furniture in the dark, not when she had changed all the locks after moving in.

Eventually Nicole got down to only two full moving boxes left to deal with, and most of their contents turned out to be holiday decorations which, she reasoned to herself, were supposed to stay in a box when not in use, so taking the few non-holiday related items out of the boxes and shoving the rest into a closet as-is so she could declare herself to be officially unpacked was a perfectly reasonable course of action and not cutting corners at all. That left her with only a small pile of sweaters, a box of string lights, and an old corded phone to deal with, and then she'd be done. She put the sweaters in a drawer to wait for cooler weather. She intended to use the lights to decorate the headboard of her bed, but it was getting late in the day and she was getting hungry, so she set the package of lights aside to deal with after dinner. She was less sure of what to do with the phone. She wasn't even sure why she hadn't bothered to get rid of it while decluttering before the move. She thought she might just get rid of it, because who bothered to pay for a landline these days? She dropped the phone onto the bed next to the lights and headed to the kitchen to find some food.

When Nicole came back to the bedroom a couple of hours later (she had turned on the TV while eating and found one of her favorite movies had just started playing, so of course she had to watch it all the way to the end) she noticed that the phone's handset was lying off of its cradle, but she figured that it had just bounced that way when she dropped it on the bed. More distracting was the fact that the package of lights looked a little more… bulgy? than she remembered it being. The cardboard of the small box pushed outward in the middle, and opening it revealed that the lights were tangled into a messy lump, which Nicole knew for certain was not how she had packed them for moving. Even with all the jostling of hauling everything from one house to the other, they shouldn't have been able to tangle so thoroughly while still in their little box, but she couldn't think of any other explanation for what she was seeing. She shrugged it off with the thought that maybe this was what scientists were talking about when they started going on and on about the mysteries of string theory. She spent a few minutes trying to untangle the lights, but they were so thoroughly knotted that she soon gave up with the reasoning that she was way past the age to be decorating her room as if she were still living in a dorm. She decided she would just donate the lights to Goodwill at the same time she got rid of the old phone.

She set both the lights and the phone on the nightstand with the intention of dropping them off at Goodwill on her way to work in the morning, but day after day she kept forgetting to take them with her when she left the house and being annoyed when she realized that mistake when she got home again, so eventually she just threw them both back into the box of decorations and forgot about them completely.

Summer turned into fall, and then fall started sliding into winter, and Nicole started thinking about putting up some holiday decorations to bring a little cheer to the shortening cold dark days. She pulled the box of decorations out of the closet, removed the top layer of messy string lights and old phone and discovered that all the Christmas lights underneath were now a mess too. While Nicole tried to convince herself that there were many perfectly good explanations for how this could have happened on its own and why she shouldn't freak out about it, the unplugged phone in her hand chose that moment to ring. Nicole dropped it with a startled screech.

The phone kept ringing.

Nicole looked around to make sure that the phone definitely was not plugged into anything and that the noise couldn't possibly be coming from anywhere else. In both cases, the answer was No. "Oh, god, I'm in a horror movie, aren't I?" she muttered to herself.

The phone kept ringing.

Nicole tentatively brought the handset up to her ear, took a shaky breath, and said, "Hello?"

"Are you gonna put up a Christmas tree?" asked a male voice from the other end of the line, wherever that could be when the line was, as previously mentioned, definitely not connected to anything.

"I… uh… what?" Nicole stammered.

"I really want you to put up a Christmas tree," said the voice as if this were somehow anything resembling a normal conversation. "They're so much fun!"

"I wasn't really planning on it," Nicole lied. She reasoned to herself that as much as she really wanted to put up a tree, if creepy disconnected phone voices wanted her to do it then maybe it wasn't the best idea. There was no telling what she might be encouraging or what it might demand of her next.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," Nicole said, "I'm sure."

"Awww," whined the voice, and then the phone went dead.

"What the hell was that?" Nicole asked the empty house, but nothing answered her. She stared at the phone handset with a bemused sort of dull panic for a few minutes and then set it down in its cradle even though that shouldn't have mattered since both parts were still disconnected from each other and everything else.

Needless to say, Nicole did not sleep very well that night. She tossed and turned, constantly questioning whether it would be safer to call up one of her friends and ask if she could stay with them or go find a hotel, but she didn't want to be chased out of her own house by what might or might not be a ghost, especially not one who sounded a little bit awkward and nerdy.

The next day, she called up the previous owners of the house, using her perfectly ordinary cell phone and not the possibly haunted one, though it did make her wonder for a moment if the phone company was going to try to charge her for calls from ghosts.

"Hi, Sarah," Nicole said as soon as the woman on the other end picked up, "this is Nicole. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about the house I bought from you. You see, something weird happened—"

"No givebacks!" Sarah exclaimed.

"I… uh… what?" Nicole stammered for the second time in less than twelve hours. She remembered the couple who she bought the house from being young, but she didn't remember them acting like actual children.

"The ghost is your problem now, honey, and good luck with him," Sarah said quickly, in a voice which dripped the essence of 'sorry not sorry' from every syllable. "I don't know where he came from, but he's like a cat in a human body, minus the corporeal body part, and he's going to wreck any Christmas lights you try to put up. He just has some weird obsession with them. Maybe you can find some other poor sucker to take the place off your hands, but it isn't going to be us. I checked with my lawyer and everything." And then she hung up before Nicole could say anything else.

Nicole hadn't bothered to look at the chain of title of past owners further back than the ones she was buying from, but now she was curious and called her realtor. The list of names she got was a long one for such a recently built house, with no one owning it for much more than a year, and calls to all the ones she could find contact information resulted in a lot of very similar conversations about destroyed Christmas lights, except for one Jewish family who hadn't noticed any problems and had only moved because they wanted to retire to Florida.

The one comfort Nicole found was that her apparent ghost didn't seem malevolent, just fail-boaty. And she really did what to put up a Christmas tree, so she decided she would untangle her lights and take a chance. She only turned her back for a moment, and when she looked back the lights were a wreck again.

The disconnected handset, which she couldn't quite bring herself to get rid of, rang.

"Sorry," said the man's voice on the other end. "I just get excited because I love Christmas lights so much."

Nicole did too, and she really wanted a way to enjoy them this holiday season. Then she remembered something she had heard about which might be able to help both of them.

"Have you heard about Goodwin Park?" she said, and it wasn't quite the start to a beautiful friendship, but it was better than nothing.

**The End**


End file.
